The Spore creature creator (demo?) is now available for people to download and play with:

It's a very powerful and user-friendly tool for creating fun looking 3d creatures, originally intended to be used with an upcoming game called spore, but increasingly looking like it will be a standalone toy.

What i thought would be really fun is to have a contest to see who can make the best Spore Creature version of our mascot Cody. You can see more pictures of Cody on Nudone (Nick Pearson)'s website (http://www.wtfcody.com).

Winner will be chosen on July 1st or soon after and I hope Nudone will agree to judge the winner. Prize will be a dc mug with the real Cody and your Cody creature side by side.

Christ, why do they have to try and obfuscate the names? It's not like it confuses the pirates and the crackers anyway. I really want to purchase spore and support the developers, but seeing that it's EA branded and with the horror stories about the new phone-home and limited-number-of-activations crap... I almost feel like pirating it, just to set an example >_<